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Adelaide Literary Magazine is an independent international monthly publication, based in New York and Lisbon. Founded by Stevan V. Nikolic and Adelaide Franco Nikolic in 2015, the magazine’s aim is to publish quality poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork, and photography, as well as interviews, articles, and book reviews, written in English and Portuguese. We seek to publish outstanding literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and to promote the writers we publish, helping both new, emerging, and established authors reach a wider literary audience.

A Revista Literária Adelaide é uma publicação mensal internacional e independente, localizada em Nova Iorque e Lisboa. Fundada por Stevan V. Nikolic e Adelaide Franco Nikolic em 2015, o objectivo da revista é publicar poesia, ficção, não-ficção, arte e fotografia de qualidade assim como entrevistas, artigos e críticas literárias, escritas em inglês e português. Pretendemos publicar ficção, não-ficção e poesia excepcionais assim como promover os escritores que publicamos, ajudando os autores novos e emergentes a atingir uma audiência literária mais vasta. (http://adelaidemagazine.org)

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Published by ADELAIDE BOOKS, 2020-04-18 18:52:34

Adelaide Literary Magazine No. 34, March 2020

Adelaide Literary Magazine is an independent international monthly publication, based in New York and Lisbon. Founded by Stevan V. Nikolic and Adelaide Franco Nikolic in 2015, the magazine’s aim is to publish quality poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork, and photography, as well as interviews, articles, and book reviews, written in English and Portuguese. We seek to publish outstanding literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and to promote the writers we publish, helping both new, emerging, and established authors reach a wider literary audience.

A Revista Literária Adelaide é uma publicação mensal internacional e independente, localizada em Nova Iorque e Lisboa. Fundada por Stevan V. Nikolic e Adelaide Franco Nikolic em 2015, o objectivo da revista é publicar poesia, ficção, não-ficção, arte e fotografia de qualidade assim como entrevistas, artigos e críticas literárias, escritas em inglês e português. Pretendemos publicar ficção, não-ficção e poesia excepcionais assim como promover os escritores que publicamos, ajudando os autores novos e emergentes a atingir uma audiência literária mais vasta. (http://adelaidemagazine.org)

Keywords: fiction,nonfiction,poetry

Revista Literária Adelaide

It got worse – she started calling out for her mother, would forget my mom, us, called
my sister Sharon (my mom’s name), would fall, sit silent, seemingly empty of thought or
emotion, unplugged from the world. There was rage in her voice, anger toward my mother.
I don’t know he mom handled it, but she did with help from my dad and my sister. I guess I
helped, as well, but I shied away from it, a bit fearful of what it all meant. We moved her to
a nursing home, where she spent the last two or three years of her life. I didn’t visit, found
excuses not to, excuses that made me feel noble – I didn’t want to remember her that way, I
told myself and my mom. I was fooling myself, and I knew it, and it’s something I regret today.

4.

Mom’s been cooking a lot, dad says, mostly from memory, from recipes she’s known a long
time, but also some newer ones. This seems a good sign, though we may be grasping for
small victories as a way of justifying an unearned optimism. From what I’ve read, Alzheimer’s
damages not only the basic functions of memory, but the ability to complete the most basic
tasks. That’s what Geri Taylor experienced as the disease took hold of her mind.

Taylor, who was profiled in an exceptional piece of journalism in The New York Times
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/01/nyregion/living-with-alzheimers.html),
described “the sensation of clouds coming over her, mantling thought.” Taylor found that
“mundane tasks stumped her.”

“She told her husband, Jim Taylor, that the blind in the bedroom was broken. He
showed her she was pulling the wrong cord. Kept happening. Finally, nothing else working,
he scribbled on the adjacent wall which cord was which.

Then there was the day she got off the subway at 14th Street and Seventh Avenue
unable to figure out why she was there.”

It was relatively early; the disease was progressing, but had not fully compromised
her. But the diseased progressed, as it always does. “Certain words became irretrievable,
sentences coiled inside her mind and refused to come out, belongings vanished: keys, glasses,
earrings. She lost things and then forgot what she had lost. Or that she had lost them.” It was
a “fraying at the edges of her life.”

“She had trouble with elapsed time. It was getting impossible for her to distinguish
between the past, the present and the future. Blots of time melded together. She seemed
forever in the present, as if her life was one jumbled moment — breakfast, shower, lunch,
dinner, movie, shopping, everything conflated together and happening right now. It was as
if, without even trying, she had become a Buddhist.”

Mom is not a Buddhist. Nor has she lost her sense of time. Mom forgets things. She
asks, repeatedly, where they’re going, but she still keeps the house mostly clean. She gets lost
in the casino, but still does her word search puzzles. She loses the thread of conversations,
repeats herself, but still bowls. She plays the machines, keeps track of her money, but she has
become wholly dependent on my dad. It is early, but not that early.

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5.

We wait and we hope, but we know where this goes. We know because we’ve lived it. But we
also can’t fully know because it manifests differently in each individual – whether Alzheimer’s
or another form of dementia. For my grandmother, it was delusions. For Aunt Tessie, my
wife’s aunt, it is disconnection. Geri Taylor experienced a compression of time, a loss of
“executive function.” Glen Campbell started forgetting lyrics and guitar licks, sometimes
turned combative, eventually needed to be placed in a home.

The doctors have been little help. It’s not their fault; the disease my mom is slowly losing
herself to is a disease few fully understand, and it’s difficult to disentangle the disease from
the natural memory loss associated with aging.

And yet, optimism seemed to guide my dad’s reaction and actions – at least, until
recently. He would downplay her growing deficiencies, seem to ignore some of the signs,
ascribe them to other less ominous causes, and I would accept his accounts. This was due,
at least partly, to his desire to protect us, and to my tendency to downplay what scares me,
to pretend the worst can’t happen (even as I silently stew in my fear, obsess over worst-case
scenarios). So a sense of unjustified hope hangs above us, sharing space with the dread, with
the fear of biology and heredity.

But optimism should be earned. The question is: How does one find that optimism,
earn that sense of hope in the face of an end foretold? Biology is destiny, even if heredity
may not be. Simply put: We live to die, and watching my mom’s mind erode is a reminder of
this. She is nearly 77. My dad is approaching 79. I am 54. Graying hair, a bald spot, bad knees
and ankles. The body imposes its will, reminds us of our impermanence, that time is growing
short for us. Death, the word I’ve resisted in this essay, is always with us, lurking. We spend
our lives trying to outrun it, but it’s there, inescapable. My grandparents. My cousin Owen.
My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, my wife’s godmother. My friends – Tommy, Glen, Wayne,
Jimmy, Ed, Frank, Joe.

When we are young, we feel indestructible. We are not, and our parents’ growing frailty,
their vulnerability, unmasks the lie.

In the face of this, hope – that thing with feathers that asks for nothing – can be a lodestar
leading us in the wrong direction. Campbell implies this, unintentionally, when he sings the
Guided by Voices song “Hold on Hope,” on the album Ghost on the Canvas. The original,
melancholy, ironic in its desperate grasping, is transformed in Campbell’s performance. The
irony is gone. His diagnosis – central to the documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, which
chronicled his final tour and showed him playing his ass off on guitar – gives the song a
different kind of urgency, as does the singer’s devout Christianity. Biography is essential to
understanding Campbell’s reading of the song, and yet the triumphant notes that carry the
Campbell version toward its conclusion give way to the melancholy carnival piano of “Valley
of the Son.” The illusion is shattered. The feathers fall away.

Cue the existential dread, the paralysis. And yet, we go on, we find reasons to persevere.
Campbell – and many others – finds his in religion and faith. I need to look elsewhere. Camus,
the atheist, describes existence in “The Myth of Sisyphus” as both absurd and necessary.

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Sisyphus is sentenced by the gods to repeatedly and eternally roll a boulder up a hill only
to witness its descent. It is an absurd act, but rather than give in to despair – according to
Camus – he proves himself stronger than the gods.

Sisyphus is us; the boulder is our lives, our existence. The repetition, the inevitability,
of failure – this is our biology. We are born; we live; we die. Meaning comes from what we
do while we’re here. Our consciousness is our strength, but also our weakness. We need to
admit the absurdity, the seeming futility of existence, and then rebel against this – by staring
the futility in the face, admitting the terror it inspires, and continuing to connect with the
world, with our loved ones, with our most unreachable dreams.

To give in to the futility, to the paralysis is, as Camus makes clear, tantamount to suicide.

6.

I feel myself becoming obsessed. My mom’s recent visit, her inability to connect beyond the
simplest interactions, her confusions, my impatience – all of it weighs on me. My OCD – the
stuck thoughts – has me mired in doubt. I watch Glen Campbell slowly deteriorate, forget
the lyrics to songs he has been singing for decades, struggle with guitar licks, tussle with his
band – his family – on stage in front of thousands.

Campbell is asked about Alzheimer’s, responds as though it is a person, someone he
knows. He struggles with names. Accuses his son of stealing his golf clubs, walks the house
club in hand, a menacing presence.

My mom constantly plays with her iPhone, looks through her recent calls, thinks she’s
missed a call. She speed-dials my aunt, thinking it is an incoming call; she hangs up with her
friend Harriet, then calls her back immediately, thinking she missed her.

She’s here for a week. I’m exhausted. Annie’s better at this than I am, but my dad is a
saint, demonstrating patience I never expected him to have. He always has been the kind of
man who would leave a restaurant rather than wait more than 15 or so minutes to be seated,
but now he listens to mom’s stories again and again, corrects her over and over, yet manages
never to betray his exasperation. He tells me otherwise. He says he loses his patience with
her when they are home, especially if her condition interferes with important matters. But
I don’t see it.

At the same time, I know what it costs him emotionally. He’s never been a man of the
written word. He’s a veracious reader, someone who likes to socialize, to talk about sports
and current events, but he is not someone who is prone to put pen to paper.

Yet, about a year ago, he sent us a letter – he couldn’t speak on the phone because mom
was always there. He had to fill us in, put his worries into words. He told us, mechanics be
damned, that his health was good, but acknowledged he was “getting older and (had) seen
people who have had problems.” He was concerned. Mom was getting worse.

“She is getting so forgetful that sometimes I have lost her in the casino, among other
situations. We have stopped going out with the people we use to see because they are

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uncomfortable with her repeating and forgetting. I am not happy about giving up socializing
but I can live without it.”

We called him when we received the note. It was unlike him. He downplayed it. He just
needed to vent, he said, but we knew it was more.

7.

I have their wedding picture above my desk, one of many black-and-white photos. They are
so young – my mom was 20, my dad 22. They are thin and fresh faced, but it is the eyes I’m
drawn to, the clarity, the focus. Mom stares straight into the camera, her eyes locked on the
viewer, who has no choice but to return the gaze.

Above my parents on the wall are my mom’s parents, a faded image from the 1920s. My
grandparents stand looking to the right. They are not smiling, which appears to have been the
convention of the time. My grandmother’s eyes, like my mom’s, are clear, magnetic.

I don’t remember those eyes, can only remember my grandmother’s vacant stare as
she sat in our kitchen, or the wholly empty gaze she offers the camera when she is pictured
at my brother’s bar mitzvah, a vacancy I start to see in my mom’s eyes, but only in flashes.
She’s still there, still with us. Even in photos.

8.

Manzeppi seeks the Philosopher’s Stone. Hidden in a mechanical bird, a wind-up toy, the
stone, when exposed to moonlight, turns all it touches to gold, and Manzeppi and the
beautiful Gerda Scharff (played by Michele Carey) are entranced by its possibilities, Scharff
is ultimately killed by her greed and carelessness – she turns to gold as she attempts to spirit
away the stone for herself.

The Philosopher’s Stone. A myth. Legend. The basis of the false science of alchemy,
viewed by some traditions as the key to immortality (http://www.history.com/news/
ask-history/what-was-the-philosophers-stone). I turn to my mom. She’s silent. I think, “if
only,” and then, “no.” This is where the paralysis creeps in, where the fear intersects with
the failure to fully accept the limited duration of our lives. The the golem (https://www.
jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Golem.html) of Chelm, Frankenstein’s monster,
Dracula, Doctor Faustus, even Deadpool and Wolverine – a whole literature explaining the
extreme costs of seeking to live beyond our expiration dates.

Mom watches. Dad’s asleep again. The new year is set to begin in a few hours, and they
will be on their way back to Las Vegas.

Mom asks “Who is he?” as Victor Buono bids West and Gordon adieu.
“Manzeppi,” I tell her for the fourth or fifth time, “Victor Buono.”

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“Oh,” she says. “He looks familiar.”
Scharff dies, her now inert and shining frame unstable, bursting in a flash of dust, a
“wisp of smoke.” Manzeppi escapes, the Philospoher’s Stone is kept from the hands of the
madman. West and Gordon head off for more adventures. The remains of the stone – scraps
of gold leafing – are left with Mama Angelina, the Italian cook who comes in to clear the
dinner dishes on their train. She dims the lights, opens the window, the moon transforms the
scraps once again into a pecking bird. Mama finds it, tucks it away for her child. The quest
continues. Roll credits.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist and the author of three chapbooks and he full-
length As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a collaboration with photographer Sherry Rubel. His
poetry and prose have been published in The Progressive, In These Times, Main Street Rag,
The Idiom, The Aquarian Weekly, Big Hammer, Big Scream, the Journal of New Jersey Poets,
City Belt, The Higginsville Reader, The River Poets Presents, The Writer’s Gallery, Middlesex: A
Literary Journal, Flux, The Other Half, Potomac, Pop Transit, Pop Matters, The Subterranean,
Adelaide, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars,, and numerous other publications.He is teaches
journalism at Rutgers and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community
College and writes regularly for NJ Spotlight and The Progressive Populist.

203

RUNAWAY

by Noelle Wall

I ransack the drawers, pulling out one sweater, then another, then stuffing them back in again.
I’m frantic, far from tears. Tears would mean letting go, and I can’t. I have to focus. Deep
breaths. It’s not too late to change my mind. I can unpack the carefully folded little shirts and
pants and jammies I’ve stuffed into a pillowcase; I can put the stack of diapers back on the
shelf beneath the crib. Pack; unpack. I look around the room, the crib with my sleeping baby
across from my bed, the high ceiling, the double window, lights from passing cars flashing by
in the night. We moved to this big brick Colonial, set on a hill next to the high school, only a
few weeks ago. I love the house. With its spacious rooms, glass–enclosed sun porch and front
and back stairs, it is more elegant than the small ranch we lived in for 12 years. My father
had wanted the bigger house for my sister’s wedding the following summer and, I thought,
perhaps for Mark and me as well.

I go to the back of the house and look out at the detached garage. Kevin’s car sits waiting
in the driveway. A week ago, when I secretly met him at a friend’s house, he begged me to
stay with him. I had only seen him a few times since Mark was born, nearly a year and a half
before. Kevin had come to the hospital then to see Mark, and I had a few minutes with him
before my parents sent him away. That was the deal. I was to remain under their supervision
until I was 18, no phone, no friends, no leaving the house alone––except for school, straight
there and straight home––and then only because I was required to attend by law. If Kevin
loved me, he would wait for me. Pregnant at fourteen, shamed and terrified, I agreed.

But Kevin persisted, sending notes through friends at school and finally getting me to
agree to see him. Sneaking out one night when my parents were away, I climbed the wooded
hill behind our house, and Kevin granted me a wish I could only imagine. He drove me to the
Peppermint Lounge in New York where we danced the twist as if we were any other carefree
teenagers. My parents had miscalculated when they hired a girl my age to help me with Mark
and keep watch over me while they were gone. We became friends, and she helped me sneak
out. It was nearly morning when Kevin dropped me off at the top of the hill. He wanted me
to stay with him, but I was afraid. I climbed down through the woods in my bare feet, praying
no one would see me. The house was silent; Mark was still asleep. That adventure lightened
my daydreams for weeks after.

Now I am sixteen. My parents are out for the evening, and I am running away.
I finish packing and carry my things downstairs, pillowcases and grocery bags full of our
belongings, clothes, bottles, baby food, toys. Kevin stacks them in the trunk of his Pontiac. I

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hadn’t recognized the car at first. When we were together, he’d driven a red and white 1956
Ford but, of course, that was the car he’d wrapped around a tree the previous spring, when
he’d broken his leg and wrecked his ankle. I’d learned about it at school and skipped classes
to rush to the hospital. His face was bruised and bloody, his body twisted and bandaged, leg
in a cast. I was wracked with guilt, guilt over not being there for him, guilt over disobeying
my parents.

Now it’s time. I go into the house and up the stairs one last time. I pull up the comforter
on my bed and fluff my pillow. I laugh at myself for making the bed, even now trying to avoid
disapproval. Yes, she ran away in the night, but at least she made the bed. All these months
I thought I could be redeemed by suffering. I thought I could earn back their love by dutifully
serving my sentence, forfeiting all without complaint, holding my head up at school, doing
my homework late into the night, helping at home, caring for my baby: laundry, bath time,
sterilizing, feeding, rocking, singing, waking and rocking some more.

I reach into the crib and change Mark’s diaper while he sleeps. Then I lift him into my
arms and snuggle him against my neck. It didn’t matter what I did or how I tried. I picture my
mother, her lips drawn tight with contempt. More than a year and most of our talk is about
Mark. How cute he is, what funny thing he is doing. We have found a middle ground where
our love for Mark supersedes all else. There’s a routine now, and I carefully avoid doing or
saying anything that could elicit the expletives of a year ago. Whore. Slut. Liar. Selfish bitch.
But they are there. Recently she told me that she longed to be free of us, and it was because
of me, of Mark and me, that she was forced to stay with my father whom she hated. And a
few weeks ago she said, You know, I might have had some respect for you, if you had stood
up for your love and gone away with Kevin.

I grab Mark’s blankie and hold it around him while I carry him down the stairs and out
to the car. Kevin takes Mark while I get in the front seat, then hands him to me. It’s a bench
seat and, with Mark squirming on my lap, I slide closer to Kevin as he starts the car. I feel a
flicker of hope, a beginning. Where are we going, I ask.

Noëlle Wall’s background is in advertising and television, though writing is her first love.
She is an alumna of the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College, and a member
of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and Fiction Group. Her short story, Secrets, won first
place in the New Millennium Writings Short Story Contest. She recently completed her first
novel, Flesh and Bone, about a young woman’s quest to discover the secret that haunted her
grandfather and endangers her life. Noëlle lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the
photographer, Tom Wall.

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THE DEPOSITION

by Michael R. Morris

I was escorted into a hushed and windowless room full of lawyers, asked to sit down behind
a conference table too big for a game of ping-pong. As I settled into my chair, I calmed
down enough to see that the room wasn’t actually filled with lawyers, but only two—one
representing my mom, the other representing my dad—along with an assistant and a
stenographer. I was overwhelmed, like a puppy in a house filled with too many guests.

After the introductions were made, my mom’s lawyer Mr. Stevenson, a well-coifed man
with a mustache and a pinky ring, asked if I knew what was about to happen. My dad’s lawyer,
Mr. Duncan, sat to the side of the meeting, wearing a jacket and tie with jeans and what was
almost a mullet. Apparently he was not the one running the show. These weren’t his law
offices. Mr. Stevenson was the one getting the bigger check.

“I think so,” I muttered.
“You’ll be giving a deposition. It’s like a court hearing, but without the jury,” Mr.
Stevenson explained. “You just have to swear to speak the truth under the penalty of perjury.
Do you understand?”
I nodded and swallowed.
After I held up my right hand and swore to speak the truth and all that, both lawyers
adjusted the papers in front of them, armed with pens. Mr. Stevenson ID’d the date, time and
location of the deposition while the stenographer pattered away at her dwarfish keyboard.
“Now, if you please, Mr. Morris, tell us what you remember about what happened
before the altercation between your mother and father. From the beginning.”
The swiveling chair beneath me vacillated, denying me a firm platform from which to
speak. So I steadied myself and cleared my throat.
“Well, it was my dad’s turn to spend part of the afternoon with me. I believe it was
his idea to go to the Natural History Museum. But my mom wanted to make a copy of my
apartment key so she could come and go as she pleased. She decided to stay with me, while
my dad found some cheap hotel down in the east village…”

***

It was going to be my graduation day from college. I should be more proud and say “university.”
New York University. Tisch School of the Arts, Film and Television. Yeah, that’s right! Four

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years of going to school in Manhattan and making student films. Graduation was supposed
to be an important day, but the whole thing made me uneasy. I couldn’t decide whether I
should invite my mom or my dad to the ceremony. They would both have to fly from Los
Angeles, so there was no easy answer there. I already knew by this time in my life that my
parents couldn’t be allowed in the same room at the same time.

When I was 11, my mom came to my dad’s apartment to pick me up for soccer practice.
She tried to enter the apartment to see what his new girlfriend looked like, but he wouldn’t
allow her inside. He had to grab her arms to prevent her from barging in. As I stood in the
hallway with my knee-high socks and cleats, watching my parents wrestle with each other, I
edged toward the sixth floor fire escape, hoping that one of them wasn’t going to throw the
other over the edge.

A year later, my dad came up to the house in Topanga to pick me up for his every-other-
weekend rights when my mother grabbed at him, trying to get him to listen to her as we
were trying to drive away. He batted her arms away, yelling, “You’re harassing me! You’re
harassing me!”

When I listen to an old cassette recording of one of my first Christmas’s—I’m just a
goo-goo voice, cooing at new presents—it sounds like my parents barely acknowledged each
other.

For as long as I could remember, I knew my parents couldn’t be allowed in the same
room.

I was 22 now and you’d think my parents—ten years after their divorce—could have
come to a mature truce. I knew I might get into hot water, but I had to make a decision. They
should both come to the graduation. Why should it always be thrust upon my shoulders to
be my parents’ parents? This was my day in the sun and I wanted them to be proud of me.
Both of them.

My dad wanted to take me to the Natural History Museum that afternoon, but my mom
didn’t want to be stranded in my apartment. So he and I left for the subway station while
my mom tagged along, saying she would find a key copier somewhere on the street before
we reached the subway stop. The three of us walked from my apartment on 5th Avenue and
19th Street up to 23rd street together, still no sign of a key copier. My mom just wanted to
keep on walking with us until she found one. She insisted on copying my apartment keys. She
insisted on staying at my apartment during her stay in New York. Did I want her to stay there?
No. But I had a cold and she used that as an excuse to stay close—as a mother should—and
give me abundant helpings of her herbal remedies. How can you refuse your own mother? is
the voice that popped into my head as soon as I considered asserting myself.

Now we were approaching the subway stop on 23rd street and still no place to copy my
key. I didn’t really care what she was going to do without one. She could have wandered the
streets for all I cared. She could have stayed locked inside my apartment, too. My roommates
Ze’ev, Laura and Johanna might have to deal with her, but let them discover what I had to
grow up with. I was too sick of it all to offer an alternative.

Standing at the top of the stairs to the subway entrance, my mom came to an impasse.
My dad was fidgeting impatiently for her to get lost, so that he and his son could spend an

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afternoon together. He had lost custody of us over a decade ago and was forced to treasure
his moments with me when he had them.

But now my mom said:
“Well, why don’t I just come along to the Natural History Museum. I’d like to see it, too.”
“Mom.”
“Well why can’t I? Just because you’re both going doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to go.
I’ll just go on my own. I’ll sit away from you on the subway.”
With that, my dad threw in the towel. He didn’t actually have a towel handy, so he used
what he was holding: his umbrella. Fed up, he launched the umbrella to the bottom of the
stairs like a paper airplane, a sarcastic gesture not furious but just a percolation of rage. He
had had it.
When my mom planted her heels, she never budged.
Powerless, my dad walked down to the bottom of the stairs to pick up his umbrella. I
didn’t want to see him come back up the stairs with it. I knew something like this was going
to happen. I knew that they couldn’t even manage to be civil together. Without wanting to
imagine what shouting or wrestling match was going to occur next, I turned right around and
walked away.
I remember dodging a lamp post in my hasty retreat, so hateful that my parents were
doing this again. A distant glimmer within me thought I shouldn’t run away, but most of me
said “Get the fuck out of there!” I was a little boy again. A little child, helpless, unable to stop
my world from caving in, unable to stop my universe from splitting into two and colliding
against itself. I had expected the worst, and now the worst was happening. It was time to give
up, so I did. I gave up on my family.
I returned alone to my apartment to blow off steam. Our four-bedroom loft apartment
was empty except for my roommate Laura’s gray Chow Chow named Winnie. Winnie never
liked me, and I never liked Winnie. Sometimes I would enter my own apartment to find
Winnie standing inside, watching me. Just for fun I would crouch low and keep my eyes
riveted to her, like I was about to pounce on her. Sure enough, Winnie growled at me. We
were enemies, and I was quite comfortable with that.
Fifteen minutes later, my mom knocked on the door. When I opened it, she gave me
that ‘mom’ look, as if to say we should all be ashamed—‘we’ meaning all men. She never
forgave me for being a man; that is, being more like my father than her. Whenever I defied
her or showed frustration to her, she accused me of acting like him. Well, between her and
him, who else was I supposed to act like? I can’t learn everything from TV.
So she entered my apartment rambling about things I never pay attention to, the details
of which I have long since been trained to tune out because my mom didn’t know when to
shut her off her verbal faucet. She could have been saying “strangled me on the sidewalk” in
the same sentence as “a few drops of oregano oil mixed into a spoonful of olive oil work as a
natural antibiotic” and I wouldn’t have detected a ripple of urgency in her tone.
It was in my dad’s voice that I detected something had happened out there on 23rd
Street. He eventually came back to my apartment, probably after he’d sulked several square

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blocks, and asked to take a walk with me. We walked from 19th Street to 20th Street, over
to Broadway, back down to 19th Street and then returned back to 5th Avenue. During that
time, he told me this:

“I—I think I really went too far this time.” There was a tremor in his voice that shook
me to my foundation. “When I came back up the stairs and saw you were gone, I just lost it.
I grabbed your mother by the collar and screamed at her, ‘Where’s Michael?’ I think I really
scared her.”

***

“‘I think I went too far this time’,” I told Mr. Stevenson. The stenographer pecked away at her
mini-keys as content as a pigeon in Central Park. Happy to have a job and listening to other
people’s problems.

“Is that all he said?” asked Mr. Stevenson.
“Yeah. It was his tone of voice that affected me. Like he was truly sorry—or afraid—for
what he did. That’s what I remember.”
“But all he said he did was grab her and yell at her?”
“Yes.”
“According to your mother’s report, she says he grabbed her, pushed her all the way
across the sidewalk and slammed her into a building. She knocked her head and got a
concussion. Now think harder. Are you sure that’s all your father said?”
“Excuse me. He already told you what he remembered,” Mr. Duncan cut in. “There’s no
need to ask him more than twice.” Apparently this is why he was present. His job was to keep
his rival in check during the deposition.
Mr. Stevenson turned to Mr. Duncan, eyeing him as an obvious inferior. “I didn’t ask him
more than once. I asked him if he was sure he remembered correctly.”
“He already told you what he remembered his father said. There’s no need to read out
his mother’s statement in front of him. You’re trying to put ideas into his head.”
“I’m just reminding him of his mother’s testimony.”
“You’re calling into question his own eyewitness account. This is a deposition.”
Mr. Stevenson sighed. The stenographer waited. Mr. Duncan watched me.
“Okay,” Mr. Stevenson continued, “scratch it from the record.”
“Let’s keep it,” Mr. Duncan said.
“Ms. Coady?” Mr. Stevenson turned to the stenographer. Ms. Coady looked over what
she had just typed.
Ms. Coady used a pen to make a mark somewhere on the roll of paper. I had no idea
what this meant. I would end up later with a manuscript of the entire meeting to look over
and make corrections. I don’t remember if they scratched that dispute from the record. But my
dad would test the weight of the manuscript and say, “Look at that. Just like a movie script.”
A week later back in New York, I handed it to a filmmaker friend named Jonathan Chance
and told him, “It’s just like a movie script, isn’t it?”

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Jonathan smiled wryly and said, “You could have made your own movie for what this
probably cost.”

Mr. Stevenson laced his fingers upon his notes of my mom’s testimony and wriggled his
shoulders as if wrestling with the notion of strategy.

“Now Michael. I know this is very difficult for you. No one can ask you to choose sides
between your parents. But this is a very important case. Tell me. Do you think your father
was telling the truth?”

“I don’t know.”

“What I’m asking you is, do you think he gave your mother a concussion or did he just
grab her coat and yell at her?”

I looked at both the lawyers. I didn’t want to be there. He was right. How could I choose
between my parents? What he was asking me was if I thought one of my parents was in the
wrong. Better yet, if one of my parents was suspiciously evil. I really didn’t know. They were
both wrong. They both fought since as long as I could remember. They wanted me to tell
them which of my parents was more wrong than the other one? For all I knew, I was in the
wrong for being born unto them.

“I don’t know what to believe. To tell you the truth, I believe both of them. When my
mom tells me that she hit her head on the side of a building, I believe her. When my dad says
he just grabbed her and screamed at her, I believe him. I wasn’t there. I can only tell you what
they told me afterward.”

“So, you don’t have your own opinion on what happened?”

“No. I don’t have an opinion.”

For as long as I remember, I’ve never had an opinion. Even at nine years old, I backed away
from arguments, never chose sides. Growing up with vague stories from Nicaragua, Lebanon
and the Soviet Union, I saw the whole world fighting and didn’t want to have anything to do
with it. Instead, I just went outside and created my own world of action adventure fantasy. I
waged wars between my X-wing fighters and my Stretch Armstrong, and used firecrackers and
Raid-can flame throwers to seal the fate of the loser. Luke Skywalker teamed up with Spider
Man to blow up a fortress manned by stormtroopers and that floating robot from ‘The Black
Hole.’ My battles always had a fiery ending. And if one action figure or another didn’t melt in
a puddle of lighter fluid, they would fall burning from my second floor balcony into a thicket
of Topanga Canyon weeds. Yes, my battles had a definitive conclusion.

But the battles that went on inside the house went on indefinitely. Even after my dad
had left, the battles still raged on in our hearts. My brother lashed out for being grounded
and punched holes in the walls. My mother would go bawling into her bedroom when her
two sons refused to do chores. I accused my brother of stealing from my collection of comic
books, hiding my most precious even though I had no proof he’d ever done anything.

In high school, I never judged anyone. I was too concerned with fitting in to enjoy the
audacity of having an opinion about anybody else. I remember what a high school girl in the
drama department asked me after being caddy about someone else:

“You think I’m mean, don’t you?”

“No. I never thought that.”

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More truthfully, I never thought anything. I was only concerned if she liked me or not.
I don’t mean, liked me romantically. I mean, liked me enough to not make a face and walk
away when I spoke. Something a countless number of girls did in junior high.

“I don’t judge people,” I told her.
Little did she know how harshly I judged myself.
Little did I know.
The deposition ended on an unsatisfying note. If either of the two lawyers had been
looking for some juicy testimonial that either sealed or sank their case, they didn’t get it. I had
remained safely in the middle, suspended somewhere between right and wrong, between
good and evil, between black and white. I was gray.
Outside, Mr. Duncan pulled me aside on the sidewalk along Lincoln Boulevard.
“Listen, Michael. I know you don’t want to be in the middle of all this. But if you could
just understand how much this is costing your parents. I don’t want to take your dad’s money.
He’s struggling to pay me in installments.”
“What can I do about it?” I told him. “I can’t control what they do.”
“Well, if there was just some way for you to convince your mother to settle this another
way. Get them to talk to each other. You could save a whole lot of your parent’s money if they
could just talk to each other.”
“Look what happened the last time.”
“I know, I know. But I think all your mom really wants is an apology. From your dad. She
doesn’t have to go through these expensive lawyers to get that. She just wants her pain to
be acknowledged. This whole thing, with the head injury, I just don’t know. Maybe she’s just
made it up to get him to say he’s sorry.”
Sorry. Sorry for everything he’s ever done to her? Sorry for the marriage he destroyed
by running out on her while she was back east at her mother’s funeral? Sorry for a life ruined
beyond her control? How could anyone apologize for that?
I watched cars pass on the boulevard. Normal people with normal problems. How to
pay the bills, getting fired, spoiled children, voting Democrat. Did my mother make her head
injury up? When she returned to my apartment after the ‘altercation,’ she didn’t look like
she had suffered an injury, she didn’t complain about her head. Yet, several months after
she returned home, I began to hear allusions over the phone about her memory loss or lack
of motor coordination or a “melting-tingling” sensation in her brain, sprinkled amongst her
usual ramblings about alternative medicine or other things my father did wrong. In her quiet
hours at home, had she concocted a conspiratorial plan to take vengeance upon my father
for all he had done to her?
But that tone in my father’s voice. He had done something wrong and he knew it. But
was that thing he did wrong just a violent grab of her clothes? Yelling into her frightened
face? Or did something happen that afternoon on 23rd Street in Manhattan that he didn’t
want to admit?
In a growing necessity for schizophrenia, I chose to believe them both. It was all I could
afford to do. They were my parents. I came from both of them. My body and my mind was

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created and molded by both of them. I was the amalgamation of two people that should
never have met. So I would merely switch channels when I was with either one or the other,
just wanting to create peace and comfort in both camps, forgetting what my other self might
think:

I hated them. I hated them for meeting and I hated them for having me. I did everything
I could to accommodate people, to not get in the way, to try to fit in. To be invisible. Because
I wasn’t worth the space I took up.

Funny that I went to both the film and theatre school at NYU, hoping to do two programs
at once, to work twice as hard to be both an actor and a filmmaker, to use my recognized
talent to become more famous than humanly possible, to prove that I was larger than life, that
I was more important than anybody else. And all this because I felt so small, so insignificant.
I would spend the next 15 years struggling, burning myself out to prove that I was worth
something. It wouldn’t be enough to get a job and get along like everybody else. I had to be
something magnificent. I had to be something immortal. To prove that I had lived and that
I was important. This is hard work for somebody who deep down didn’t think too much of
himself. I had my work cut out for me.

“I know there’s not much you can do, Michael,” Mr. Duncan concluded. “But see what
you can do anyway.” With his battered leather briefcase, his jeans, tucked-in dress shirt and
tie, he navigated the Lincoln Boulevard traffic to get to his Toyota Camry on the other side.

I had walked away from my parents that afternoon on 23rd Street because I was
powerless. I couldn’t do anything to stop them. God knows I had learned that truth by the
age of three.

But what if I hadn’t walked away? If I stayed. If I stayed and just…didn’t do anything. Just
stopped. Not let my conditioned emotional reaction shirk me away from what was occurring.
Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe my mom’s ongoing litigation wouldn’t have
continued for another decade afterwards.

What would I have seen if I didn’t walk away? If I hovered on the sidewalk, invisible…

My dad came up from the bottom of the stairs holding his umbrella. He saw that I had
disappeared. He saw my mother standing there with that reprimanding scowl. Without being
able to control himself, he grabbed the collars of her coat and shoved her all the way across
the sidewalk, causing pedestrians to dodge and veer. Ten feet across the sidewalk and then
bam! She slammed against the large windows of a bank. Her head snapped back and hit the
glass, then popped forward again, her eyes in shock, faced with a pair of eyes that mirrored
hers. My dad had pushed her too far. All his life. Now she had hit the wall and she wasn’t
going to forgive him for it.

A week later I went to my dad’s apartment in Santa Monica and showed him the ‘movie
script’ that he had joked about. My job was to take it back to New York and correct any
inaccurate statements. My dad was sorry I had to go through all this, too.

He walked me out to my car and tried to talk about little things. It was then that I decided
I could do something, even if it ended up for nothing. The point was that I could take a stand.
Whether it was right or wrong, it didn’t matter. It’s just that I could, and that made me a
human being that deserved to live.

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“Dad,” I said to him. “I think you should write an apology letter to mom. I think that’s
all she really wants.”
My dad looked at me and vacillated. It must have been a difficult thing for him, after
all they had been through, together and apart. But something rang clear about what I had
just asked. It seemed possible somehow. It was absolutely unreasonable in many ways, but
it could be done.
“Okay,” he said, unable to shake the naïve clarity of my words. “If you think it’ll help. I’ll
write a letter to her.”

Michael Robinson Morris is an accomplished artist in film, music and prose. After graduating
from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and subsequently working many years in Hollywood film
development, he has written and directed several released feature films. His writings have
appeared in magazines such as Adelaide, Pure Slush and Down in the Dirt, while excerpts
from his forthcoming and highly personal memoir won grand prize at the Eyelands Book
Awards, published by Strange Days Books based out of Greece.”

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SUCH WERE

THE JOYS

by Jeffrey Loeb

A small gap opened between the writhing bodies, just wide enough for me to chop down
hard on the girl’s head. The brute scuffling noises and blunt shock of the knife still live within
me. So far as I know, the act was totally spontaneous; I have no memory of any forethought
or seething childhood grudges, just that the brief space within the scrum of kids disappeared
right after I struck. I do remember staring at the dull, rounded blade and hearing the girl’s
screams rising above the hubbub. After that, I don’t know; I may have dropped the knife or
tried to hide it. Somehow it ended up in my mother’s hands, and several days of punishment
followed. It turned out to be something of a neighborhood scandal, in fact.

The setting – a small sandpit just outside our back door – is locked in my memory, so I
can narrow my age down to somewhere between two and five. We’d moved at the younger
age to Riley Manor from a basement apartment in my grandparents’ home, and then again
during kindergarten to a newly-built tract house on the “good side” of town. By then, I had
one baby brother and another on the way, and we’d outgrown the second place. From my
mother’s meticulous annotations of my baby-book pictures, I’m confident the year of the
violence was 1951; in fact, using the same source, I have reason to believe the stabbing may
have occurred on my fourth birthday. The brutal assault is one of my four distinct memories
from this period; all, on some level, are traumatic.

I‘ll mention the other three here so as not to leave you in suspense, though I have no
notion of the correct order: First, my dog, Eric, a dachshund (all things German and Japanese
were popular in those post-war years), was run over on the street in front of our apartment.
He’d gone bounding after something apparently too seductive to pass up and died in the
street as I watched; I can remember his labored breaths and the light slowly leaving his eyes.
Several years later, my parents, having given up on dogs in favor of children, named one my
brothers Eric, a bit of irony lost on him but surreptitiously used by me to torment him.

Second, along with one of my first friends, Doug, I kicked out the glass of a neighbor’s in-
ground greenhouse. The man had meticulously crafted the small enclosure over a two-week
period, fashioning it on a sunward slant to range from a few inches at the base to about five

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feet at the top. We did the deed with our bare heels and for no particular reason except the
urge to destroy. Afterward, we made our way to the small neighborhood market and bought
ourselves ice-cream bars. I still bear, Trump-like, a small scar from this episode, though my
own way out of the draft when the time came was to join the Marine Corps.

Third, I let myself be seduced, serially in fact, by an older girl, Patricia, who wanted to
handle my penis and was also anxious for me to view (and touch her in the general area
of) her vagina. We performed this rite several times until I’d become quite adept at zipping
down her jeans and shoving aside her underwear – skills she painstakingly taught me. Many
of these episodes took place outside, but were caught by my mother in my bedroom when
we finally moved our hobby inside. She deemed our actions so serious that punishment was
delayed until my father got home and beat me with a hairbrush. I don’t know what Patricia
suffered, if anything.

As for the stabbing, I remember the instrument’s being a well-worn kitchen knife
apparently relegated to the outdoors, where it seems to have earned a permanent home as
a digging instrument in the bare, treeless back yard. I don’t know if my actions would have
changed, however, had it been steely sharp and deadly as a dagger.

What was the situation itself? A roiling mass of kids in the sand, the same sand on which
the entire housing project was erected, a quarter-section mound of arid prairie so undesirable
that developers of the surrounding single-family houses had carefully avoided it; our own
cookie-cutter apartments – old two-story army barracks modeled on those at nearby Fort
Riley, divided by thin walls into four separate units, each with its own indoor staircase and
entrances – had been hastily slapped together to accommodate the burgeoning number of
young families. The fight itself seems not unusual to me, nor does the fact that both genders
were equally represented in the melee. These battles needed no real provocation, occurring
more or less spontaneously anytime a certain critical mass of bodies was reached with no
parents immediately present to intervene.

I remember my victim fairly well, though no name comes readily to mind. She lived in
our building, I believe, because her mother arrived on the scene about the same time my
own did, both sprinting out their back doors to fathom what the bloody-murder screaming
was about. How long they had been our neighbors I have no real idea, but the fact that that
I don’t recall the girl’s name (and the concurrent one that we soon moved) suggests it was a
relatively short relationship. My only real memory of her family was that they were the first
ones to own a television set, one on which we kids were all occasionally allowed to watch
snowy episodes of The Howdy Doody Show on its only available channel, horizontal bands
rolling up through the picture. Perhaps I envied her the attention.

I also remember that she was somewhat younger, possibly an important factor since our
social mores were deeply primitive and, when adults weren’t present, predicated on survival
of the fittest. I should hasten to say that it could just as easily have been I on the receiving
end of the knife had the circumstances been slightly different, meaning there was probably
no real rationale for the violence except a perception of vulnerability within the victim.

And that was her crime, I’m sure: being younger and weaker (otherwise, she wouldn’t
have been on the underside of the pile; I suspect now that I needed no larger motive). All our
encounters were rife with violence of some sort, and it seems when I recall the after-school,

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pile-on beatings of kindergarten year – lurking just over the horizon at this point – that we
fell into a type of atavistic order, like the one where the proverbial chicken-with-the-spot gets
pecked to death by her fellows.

I also don’t recall feeling rejected or having suffered any verbal slights or unrequited
embarrassments, at least from this group. Ours was the uphill side of the neighborhood, the
kids here somewhat younger, unlike those from the slightly more worn residences downhill:
Riley Manor’s initial houses, single-story duplexes whose residents had been there a few
years longer and whose children – at least the senior of them – were older, their sense of
violence and alienation more sharply honed. Doug, in fact, had lived down there since birth;
his older brother, Terry, born ten months after Pearl Harbor, was one of the leaders of a roving
downhill gang of marauders. I was forbidden to wander that direction or to play with any
of the kids who lived there. We were “better than them,” my parents frequently told me, I
suppose because my father was a college graduate and my mother, an avid social-climber,
had attended one year.

So what lurked within to drive me to such unprovoked violence? My actual memory
serves up only that fleeting image of the girl’s head surrounded by a blur of movement –
arms, legs, bodies: a target very like the ones I would at some point encounter bird hunting
or, even later, in Viet Nam. I struck quick, a single downward hack, handle gripped firmly, dull
blade aimed at her naked temple. In some vague way, I have a muscle memory of the shock
at the end of the arc. Afterward, it was all shrillness and blame, mothers suddenly among
us, girls open-mouthed with horror, boys with puzzled faces. I found myself being hustled
through the back door, my mother firmly gripping my arms. I actually think that, for just one
fleeting moment, I somehow felt protected, even vindicated, by her purposefulness.

I have no recollection of the consequences or my mother’s inevitable shame or my
father’s anger – all surely fueled by perceived and actual threats to their hard-earned status,
their class insecurities. Eventually perhaps they may even have felt concern for the girl. And
I don’t remember the ensuing beatings, which surely happened, or my parents’ hurried
rationalizations and eventual recriminations against the victim, who, after all, must have
said or done something unthinkable to invite such a response.

Strangely, I now imagine, there may have been some whisper of pride in their inflated
souls that I, their firstborn, had had enough confidence to carry out this act at such a tender
age.

Jeff Loeb lives and writes in New York City. Prior occupations include: US Marine, bartender,
construction worker, waiter, truck driver, furniture mover, carpenter, college and university
teacher, radio reporter, assistant city manager, cable television company manager,
photography studio owner, farmer/rancher, and teacher. He has a PhD in English from the
University of Kansas. Journal publications include Adelaide (multiple), American Studies,
African American Review (multiple), English Journal, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (multiple),
and War, Literature, and the Arts (multiple). Book entries include “Foreword” in Black
Prisoner of War and “Afterword” in Memphis, Nam Sweden.

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PREY

by Megan Madramootoo

“Let me talk to you for a second.”
I dropped what I was doing, catching my breath abruptly inside my throat. His usual

deep and soothing voice had become foreign to me, and the sudden sound of it startled my
insides. Suddenly, I realized how cold and quiet the bedroom was, even in the hot month of
August. The only thing I could hear was the muffled sounds of the PlayStation, which Ernest’s
cousin Darren was playing in the living room some fifty feet away. Considering he had at least
four young children, spread between just as many mothers, I didn’t understand why he had
nothing better to do on a Saturday evening. But there he was, in our apartment, playing a
fucking video game.

Ernest didn’t speak, so I slowly resumed my breathing. With my back still facing him, I
placed the socks in the top of the oak dresser where they belonged, and gently closed the
drawer. I then cautiously turned my attention to him and waited – arms by my sides, heart
thudding inside my ears–for him to speak.

“You killed my son. You were the reason why he died.”
My jaw fell. Ernest’s words seemed to have leapt from his mouth and raced towards me
with a punch that delivered more power than his own fists could ever achieve. All I could do
was stare dumbly at him. Stared at him as he continued to watch me through his narrowed
eyes, as if he were a voracious lion...and I was his targeted prey.
After a moment in the silence of that room, I closed my mouth and swallowed, completely
thrown off by his vicious accusation. His dark eyes began to scare me, and after swiping my
tongue across my dry lips, I told him quietly (and respectfully):
“Well…since you feel that way...I’m just gonna pack my bags and leave.”
Even though his words stunned me, I think I’d been waiting for a reason to vacate the
apartment he and I had shared for the past year. Since Isaiah died three weeks ago, our living
arrangements had become unbearable: Ernest barely had anything to say to me since leaving
our lifeless baby, Isaiah, at the hospital, choosing to avoid me at all costs, and his presence at
the apartment was also becoming a thing of the past, as he now spent most of his time with
Darren. My five-year-old son Caleb was having trouble processing what exactly was going on,
and Ernest’s sudden decision to ignore his presence made me realize that he now hated my
son for still being alive when his son didn’t make it past his six days here on earth.

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My movements robotic, I turned to exit our small bedroom with the intention of
grabbing my suitcases from the hallway closet as fast as I could. Reaching for the door knob,
I made a step to leave, but Ernest beat me to it, instantly jumping from his place on the floor
and charging towards me like a determined football player. In one swift motion, he effortlessly
turned me around so I was facing him, grabbed me by my neck, and lifted me inches from
the floor before slamming my back against the small space that separated the dresser from
the bedroom door. His long black hand began to squeeze hard, instantly stopping the flow
of oxygen between my throat and my nose as he pinned me to the wall. I felt my eyes being
forced from their sockets as I watched his own eyes morph into something I had never seen
before in my twenty-four years.

“You’re gonna fucking listen to what I have to say,” Ernest spat at me, his once-handsome
features turning demonic by the seconds that seemed to take forever to pass. And that’s
when I knew this was it. That this was the moment that all the days of silence and avoidance
were going to prove to be nothing but a simmering pot of anger, blame, and utter devastation
that finally reached its boiling point, at this very moment.

“You’re gonna fucking listen to me because you haven’t given a SHIT about my feelings
since my son died!”

He released me. I collapsed on the floor, gasping for any breath I could find, feeling
a wetness begin to make a path from my nose to my mouth. I carefully touched the liquid
with my fingers and saw that it was blood. I didn’t dare look directly at Ernest, though, as my
peripheral noticed him calmly reclaiming his place by the closet.

“Look at me, Megan. LOOK at me!”

I started to cry, not wanting to oblige his request and give away any remaining power
and self-respect I still had left. After strangling me with a rage he had never used on me
before, he was now demanding that I obey him, like I was his fucking child. I was confused.
He had never choked me before. Never held my life in the palm of his bare hands like he
had just done. And what usually preceded our fights was my yelling and screaming about
something I felt he had done wrong. But I had been quiet this time. I hadn’t yelled. I hadn’t
screamed. I hadn’t been in his face, complaining about something or the other. I had even
offered to leave. And normally, after our fights ended, a switch would automatically flip inside
his brain, compelling him to feel terribly about what just transpired, and he’d begin to wipe
my tears away...

“LOOK AT ME!”

My head snapped to attention and I reluctantly faced my dead son’s father. Just then, I
heard a man curse from the living room and remembered that Darren was in the apartment.
I knew he could hear what was going on—why didn’t he come in to help me?

“Now you’re going to listen to what I have to say, and you’re gonna watch me cry…”

Oh, my God. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“…and you’re not gonna leave until I’m finished. You hear me?”

I nodded, and at that point, a mixture of hatred and agony summoned from the deepest
and most secret depths of Ernest’s soul quickly appeared in the form of dark tears, replacing
the comical eyes I had once known only weeks before. I cried even harder as I listened to him

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tell me how it was my fault that Isaiah died…that he had told me that I didn’t have to continue
to work my physically-demanding job while I was pregnant...that after our baby died, I had
never once asked him how he was doing. How could I? He was never home anymore. And
as he talked and vented and used me for his verbal punching bag, I cried even harder. I cried
because my throat hurt. I cried for my dead baby who had shitty parents who could only leave
his body behind in a cold hospital because they couldn’t afford a proper funeral. And I cried
because I sat there and let a man continue to abuse me, even in the wake of losing a child.

Before I knew it, he had me in his arms, crying his heart out into my chest, telling me
over and over again that he didn’t mean to say those things, that he had a problem, and
that he was sorry he hurt me, once again. He then laid me down onto my back and began to
undress me from the waist down, telling me over and over again that we could try again…
that we could make another baby.

I let him have sex with me, bleeding and everything from giving birth less than a month
ago. My soul faded away with each of his thrusts, becoming as nonexistent as Isaiah’s had
when his little body finally tired of the disease that claimed him from the moment he was
born.

When I woke up the next morning, my debit card was missing. My neck sore and my
body still trembling from Ernest’s wrath, I quietly showered and dressed before going for my
debit card so that I could withdraw my share of the money to renew the lease for the next
12 months. When I couldn’t find the Bank of America card that I religiously kept inside my
wallet, I began to panic.

“Ernest, I can’t find my debit card anywhere–have you seen it?”
He could barely look at me. I wasn’t sure if guilt and shame from the night before took
over his eyes, or if he merely couldn’t stand the sight of me since he blamed me for Isaiah’s
death. He shook his head slowly. “No, I haven’t seen it. You look everywhere?”
I blew out my panic, my heart slowly starting to pick up its pace. It just so happened that
Ernest almost choked the life out of me the evening before, my debit card was now missing,
and...it just so happened…that Darren was nowhere to be found. I didn’t know if he had
spent the night or left while Ernest had me trapped in our bedroom. But I had always kept
my handbag on the door handle of the coat closet, which was inches from the front door. I
called my bank and reported the card missing.
I was outraged to learn that $600 had been withdrawn from the ATM, located less than
a mile from the apartment. And it was taken out in three separate transactions of $200 each
just a couple of hours ago. I looked at Ernest, who seemed to be waiting patiently to hear
what the bank had to say. It wasn’t unusual for me to hand over my debit card to him, in case
he needed to buy some things for Caleb while I was at work, so he knew my PIN. There was
no way he could have given the PIN to Darren...?
“Do you want us to do an investigation?” the customer service agent was asking me on
the other end of the line.
I took my eyes off Ernest, tears beginning to form for the thousandth time since Isaiah
had passed. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me...not now...not at this time...not

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when I just lost my baby. “Yes, please,” I almost begged her. “And can you tell me again what
time these transactions took place?”

“Surely, Ms. Harris. The first withdrawal was at 7:45 this morning, the other one was at
7:47, and the last one was at 7:49. If you go to the police station and press formal charges,
we’ll be able to bring up the picture of the person who did this, since our ATMs have built-in
cameras…”

I pulled the cell phone from my ear and looked at the time on the front of the phone’s
screen. It was now nearing 10 a.m. At 7:45, I was still asleep, tucked away in the bedroom
with Ernest. I knew I had my debit card on me yesterday, because I had used it to pay my cell
phone bill.

“Okay...yes, I’ll go to the police station as soon as I can to file an official report.”

“Okay, Ms. Harris. And in the meantime, we’ll do an investigation on this end and have
the money back into your account within seven to ten business days.”

I told her thank you and ended the call.

I wiped the water from my eyes and threw my cell into my bag, making a mental note
to keep it on me at all times from now on, even if I had to sleep with the damn thing around
my shoulder.

“What did they say, Megan?”

I didn’t answer Ernest. When he saw I wasn’t budging, he came over to the dining room
table where I sat and looked at me.

“Your cousin stole my money.”

His face drew a blank, and then suddenly turned into an expression of understanding.
Was this planned? Did he put his cousin up to stealing my money? Or was he not at all
surprised that Darren had done such a bastard thing?

I took a hard look at Ernest for the first time since we got back from the hospital the
day Isiaiah had died. He had lost weight–maybe five or eight pounds–his hair was growing
uncontrollably curly, defying his usual close cut, and he still wore the bracelet the hospital
had given him weeks ago, identifying him as Isaiah’s father so he could get into the NICU with
no problems. He was unrecognizable.

“I’m gonna call my aunt and see what we can do.”

I didn’t want him to call his aunt for help. She had been nice enough to me during the
couple of interactions I had with her, but I knew she didn’t like me. I said nothing, though, a
newfound fear of him now buried inside of me after last night. All I could do was remain at
the table, limp as a Raggedy Ann doll, and watch him disappear into our bedroom with the
cordless phone in his hand.

Twenty minutes later, he emerged and took a seat back at the dining room table. His
thick, once kissable lips began to turn upright at the corners of his mouth, and for a second,
I was grateful because I hadn’t seen him smile in weeks. But as I continued to watch his face,
his mouth began to twist into something that was sinister and self-satisfied.

“Aunt Alicia said that we should go to our banks and apply for a loan, and that maybe
you should go apply for one first. She also said that if you can’t get your life right with God,
then we can’t be together.”

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My heart tripped over a couple of beats before slamming against my chest for a short
pause. I’m sorry–what?? I stared at him, completely astonished, as his smile dissolved
into complete smugness. My mouth ran dry, and before I knew what I was doing, I stood,
absentmindedly knocking over the chair that I had been sitting in. Tears began to blind my
eyes once more.

I began yelling. “I’m the one who’s supposed to go ask for a loan?! It was your cousin
who stole my money! And then, you ask the same aunt for advice…the same aunt who had
NOTHING to do with me when my baby died?? Fuck, Ernest—it was her son who stole MY
MONEY!”

He just watched me—his face void of any emotion except pure joy from the nervous
breakdown I was having in front of him. Aunt Alicia had been able to convince him that I was
the enemy all along–from the very day we lost Isaiah–when she provided solace for him at
her family’s house while I was left alone in the apartment to grieve by myself. I was quickly
losing it because not only did Ernest hate me–his family hated me, too. And that meant I had
no one left on my side. Fuck! What could she say to him to make him believe that it was my
fault our child died?? I was in a world that didn’t belong to me anymore, and things were
spinning out of control faster than I could handle. I started to hyperventilate, my chest rising
and falling uncontrollably. Why couldn’t this nightmare just end?! I opened my handbag–the
same one Ernest’s cousin helped himself to just hours before–and began rifling through its
contents until I found my prescription bottle. Just then, I heard a loud, sarcastic smirk from
across the table before I heard Ernest announce:

“See, look at the pills you’re taking–SHIT! You’re not even fit to be in any kind of
relationship with me! Look at you–you’re pathetic. No wonder our son died!” Loud bellows
of laughter erupted from my son’s father as I quickly forced the cap off the medicine bottle
and popped two Ativans into my mouth, swallowing them down with only traces of spit.

I put my prescription bottle back into my bag and, in a brave move, told him:

“I’m leaving. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take this anymore, Ernest!”

And then he slowly and dramatically held his black hands out in fake resignation and
asked me:

“Do you need me to help you pack?”

And that’s when the dams gave way, and the tears started spilling over the bottom lids
of my eyes. I cried openly and desperately. “What? You really want me to leave??”

“If you’re not gonna get your life right with God, we can’t work this out, Megan. C’mon–”
he casually shrugged a shoulder– “I’ll help you pack.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening. I walked around to the other side of the table
where Ernest stood, clutching the glass table with my hand, as if it were the only thing
keeping me from falling over. Huge tears continued to splash sloppily everywhere. “Ernest,
please! I don’t want to go. I just need you to listen to me. Talk to me, not your aunt. I need
you to JUST LISTEN TO ME!” My whole body shook, but I continued to watch Ernest as I waited
for some kind of miracle to happen. Waited for him to change the carefree look on his face,
and to reach out and hold me, and to tell me that he was sorry, like he always did whenever
things went too far.

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But instead, he lifted his right hand, cracked his mouth open, and waved good-bye.
I stared, wide-eyed, crazed, still holding onto the glass dinner table for dear life.
“Bye, Megan,” he openly reiterated.
My mouth dropped, the tears refusing to stop. I wiped my face and forced my mouth
to close. I looked directly into Ernest’s eyes and searched hard for the man I thought I knew.
“Ernest, nooo.” I spoke softly through my tears. “I’m sorry.” I abhorred the weak girl who stood
there, begging a man she knew didn’t deserve her. But as I watched her during the temporary
out-of-body experience I was having, I understood that was all she could do, because what
other choice did she have?
He placed his hands gently on both of my thin shoulders, jerking me back to my reality
as he turned me towards the hall that led to our bedroom. He then removed his left hand
and used it to point straight down the narrow hall towards the room, repeating his disgust
for me, in case I hadn’t caught it moments ago:
“Bye Megan. Get your things and go.”

Having received her Master’s in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire
University, Megan Madramootoo is currently focused on completing her memoir, which will
ultimately be a collection of personal essays. Her works usually include pieces of her past
that she uses to help others who’ve experienced the same. On a normal evening, you can
find her typing furiously away, a glass of Merlot close by her side. She resides in Marlyand,
just north of the city of Baltimore.

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